This is Castle that I wanted to share with you. This is a new imprint that Matthew and I have started to foster new talent — new paper engineers and new illustrators, for projects that we can oversee in our studio that we would love to do but don’t necessarily have the time to do it with our hands. This is sort of our foray into non-fiction. I love non-fiction and I love history. I knew the first title for this series, this imprint would be Castle.
Here we have, of course, an enormous castle on the inside. People always say, well what is it about pop-ups that are so attractive or why do they inspire so many people? We say it’s the wow factor. It’s the surprise factor. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You see the cover of the book and you’re like, this looks really nice, and then you turn the page and you see something like that.
I even love that wow factor. These books have little side pop-ups too. This whole non-fiction series was also really kind of a request from the teaching community because a lot of teachers were coming to book signings and saying, we love your pop-up books. We wish there was more that we could use in our classroom to use as part of our lesson plan or as teaching tools.
We said hey we hear you. I just love fun kinds of stories. The medieval times, just like dinosaurs, were not all dry and crusty, and kids want fun stuff. They want to see what it’s like to live inside different aspects of the castle and we’ve even got some pull tabs here. This is our jousting scene. When I was a boy, I would have loved this — seeing all this cool stuff.
If I was a boy, I totally would have had this book. I would have made someone get it for me for Christmas or give it to me for my birthday. Not only do I want pop-up books to be fun, but I would like to think that if they can be used in the classroom, if they can be used in the library in story time, then my work is completed. Hopefully I’ve done a good job with it.
